Spontaneously effusing

Well, a lovely weekend in Paris – visiting friends, hanging out in the 6^e, and once again failing to get to the Sainte Chapelle, one of the finest pieces of Late Gothic architecture in Europe. Hey ho, one day I’ll get there, tho’ I’ll be cursing Dan Brown as I do so. He mentions it in the Da Vinci Code, so there are now permanent queues to get in. Hmmph.

Anyway, I’m whizzing around at high speed today, so it’s a very quick post. I’ve just been listening to a Neil Gaiman / Susanna Clarke interview courtesy of The Guardian, in which he defines a certain kind of short story as ‘miserable people having small epiphanies of misery’.

That’s a great comment, at once a definition and criticism of a certain kind of Modernist / more generally literary writing. When it’s well done (Katherine Mansfield!) it’s fantastic; when not, it’s turgid, depressing and futile. Minute, miserable subject matter becomes an end in itself – questions of quality of writing (‘how well is this done?’) are ignored.

Which raises a very interesting question. Why is subject matter rather than quality of writing so often seen as the only value needed in defining a book’s literary worth? For me, it’s because of a lack of understanding of the craft of writing.

And I’m not sure where that lack of understanding comes from. Perhaps one explanation is that, for all the talk of Modernism and Post Modernism, our approaches to judging writing remain trapped by the great Romantic pose of the spontaneous effusion.

By definition, spontaneous effusing (what an ugly word!) privileges content over form. ‘I was so moved that I had to write this…’ – so content is all and form is ignored, at best a neutral quality, at worst something profoundly restrictive. What matters is the quality of experience that drives the piece, not the quality of the piece itself.

Which throws critical negativity onto anything that’s not directly realist. Whether detective fiction, fantasy, romance or whatever else, such fiction comes not from direct observation of reality but rather from a much more mediated process of working out – of crafting. And, if you believe in spontaneous effusion, you mistrust crafting.

So, much as the Romantic pose is very attractive (‘bring me my opium, my catamite, my quill – I must compose!’) perhaps it’s time to step beyond it and acknowledge that direct observation and subsequent effusion is an aesthetic choice only, and has nothing to do with the qualitative.

Which, come to think of it, once you’ve been to a couple of poetry readings built around dodgy confessional poets is something you really don’t need to be told.

HD and Modernism

So – Hal Duncan and Modernism.

Well, his writing (particularly ‘Vellum’, as I’ve still got to sit down properly with ‘Ink’) is profoundly modernist in structure, relying on fractured narratives, parallels between individual sub-narratives, broad, deep allusiveness and massive stylistic experimentation to communicate meaning.

But it avoids the worst excesses of High Modernist mandarin-ism through their deep commitment to the broken and the battered. HD’s heroes are neither the epic good nor the epic bad; they’re the people caught between the two, the ones that see basic humanity as a fundamental virtue to live by rather than a negotiable obstacle to enlightenment.

That commitment is de-fantasised through HD’s repeated return to the narrative and iconography of the death of Matthew Shepard, a gay student who was beaten to death for his sexuality in Laramie, Wyoming in 1999. His outrage at Shepard’s murder both gives the novel its profound ethical core and works as a structural equivalent to Dickens’ ‘dying thus around us every day’ riff in ‘Bleak House’.

It reminds us that that ‘Vellum’, like all stories, results from a process of fictionalisation, a process that always begins with reality; that the brutalities and exploitative imbalances described in the book are indeed happening thus around us every day. One of Pound’s regrets in the broken, defeated ‘Pisan Cantos’ is his lack of empathy; HD takes that empathy and makes it central to his work.

And the resultant sense of ethical precision helps him step around a key Post-Modernist problem. His clear and direct sense that ‘this is just wrong’ underpins the book’s complex, broad allusive range, preventing it from falling into simple relativism.

So that’s it in a nutshell. But of course it doesn’t communicate one key thing; this is wildly enjoyable, profoundly psychedelic and utterly groovy fantasy writing.

At base it makes me think of a comment Jim Morrison made, back in the 60s – ‘The Beatles and the Stones are for blowing your mind – The Doors are for when your mind is blown.’ That’s where Hal Duncan is in relation to much genre writing – so if you haven’t read him, go check him out!

Oh, and apologies for the dodgy lineation of the Pound quotes below – each line should be staggered across the page. I’m having huge problems getting WordPress to lineate consistently. Will have another go later today…

Pounding system

Well, I’ve come down from the weekend a little more but in the aftershock I have put my back out! So now I am hobbling round my flat like a little old lady – but as well as a lovely evening with H watching Venture Brothers et al, memories of the weekend are buoying me up…

Where to start? There’s the deep generosity of Pete Crowther, the wildly comic ongoing Smith & Jones double act, the great joy of seeing the Elastic Press anthology that first brought H and I together win the year’s best award, the Stephen King upstaging Boris the crocheted Dalek, anticipating Black Static, seeing Arvon friends again – but, above all, what made it such a great weekend was epic, wonderful conversations.

One was particularly productive, in a boozy kind of way - chatting with Hal Duncan about the relationship between various aesthetic genres. Specifically, he sees Modernism as the two opposites that Romanticism and Classicism represent, crashing together into the 20th Century.

It’s a fascinating point of view, and goes a long way towards explaining much that seems to be contradictory in Modernism. Take Mondrian, for example; austere classical perfection underpinned by whacky Theosophical thinking. Or James Joyce; a deeply rationalised dissection of multiple literary forms, filtered through journalistically precise observation of Dublin, but underpinned by deep mythical structures.

My deepest engagement with Modernism always came through Ezra Pound. Here, too, you’ve got that kind of binary opposition. One (deeply reductive) way of summing up Pound’s flawed masterpiece ‘The Cantos’ is as an equation: (History + Economics) x (Mythology + Art)/Biography = Cantos.

Hal’s opposed rational and intuited structures co-exist there too, deepening and commenting on each other. But of course, they create a tension – one that in many ways is unresolvable. Pound felt this very strongly, exemplifying it in his famous, repeated lament, ‘I cannot make it cohere’. In the end, he disclaimed ‘The Cantos’, unable to find achievement in them, and writing:

M’amour, m’amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world
The dreams clash
and are shattered –
That I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.

Pound couldn’t merge the Classical and the Romantic, falling instead into Facism and then bleak repentance. Beginning ‘The Cantos’, he’d seen meaning as something to be forced onto the world, using the combined, opposite tools of intuition and analysis. At its end, he could only see it as an emergent property of systems too subtle and complex to be anything other than observed:

I have tried to write Paradise

Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise

Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made

The project of High Modernism failed, replaced by a Post-Modernism that (generalising wildly) found equal value in all things, on the positive basis that rich meaning could emerge from any one of them, and the negative one that imposition of specific meaning on a non-specific world could lead to very real social and political horrors. Decrying the death of his life’s work, Pound predicted the movement that would succeed him.

Post-Modernist relativity has its own problems; they’ve been rehearsed elsewhere, so I won’t ramble about them here. The real question is – what does all this have to do with Hal Duncan?

Well, I can’t help seeing his work – recent novels ‘Vellum’ and ‘Ink’ – as (in part) an attempt to revive the tools that the Modernist project built, and show how they remain a profoundly useful way of engaging with modernity. But it’s late in the evening now, and I’ve got much to do, so more on this tomorrow…

After the party

Well, a very hectic weekend at Fantasycon. Some fascinating panels; some wonderful speeches; some great bookshoppping; and, most importantly, meeting lots of fascinating people and having increasingly *merry* conversations into the night. As a result, last night when I got home I was so tired I could hardly sleep – a combination of complete physical exhaustion and a mind buzzing around with all the input.

And now my mind is still feeling flattened, and (having just got back from a meeting at the Tallow Chandlers) I can’t think of anything to write about, because I’ve got too much to write about. So, as is wise at these moments, I’m going to default to YouTube, with wisdom on how the Lord of the Rings should have ended…

Conventions of Stella

Well, a short entry today as I’m off to the BFS Fantasycon in Nottingham - should be a fun weekend. If you’re there, say hi! - I should be easy to spot, as I’ll probably be looking something like this for most of the weekend, tho’ minus the blue and white shirt and Zali, which is a shame:

The picture was taken just after a Stellas gig a couple of years back (thanks Richard Fontenoy!), which reminds me that our great comeback gig is happening on the 19th of October at the Klinker - details (and more on the band) here.

And with that, I’m off - Bon Weekend All!

Becoming Norma Desmond

Out and about on Wednesday night (at an event run by the estimable Poet in the City, which everyone should know about – they do fantastic poetry events round the City of London), and, as it does in pubs, the conversation turned to fantasy and sf.

As it also does when you’re around people-whose-genre-is-literary, someone came up with the question – ‘why do you write genre fiction when it has nothing to do with reality, and therefore has no point to it?’

Of course this is a red rag to a bull for me; my answering rant went on for about half an hour. In fact, it only ended when I paused for breath and noticed that the bar staff were putting the stools upside down on the tables and everyone else had left.

One of the points I made was that modern literary fiction is a pretty late arrival on the literary scene, really only beginning in the 19th Century. Fantasy has been around forever, from Homer on.

But thinking about it, that’s not such a good point after all. Much of the writing that foreshadows or powers the modern fantastic – archaic Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Norse and other myth cycles, Christian narratives from ‘Paradise Lost’ to ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, Renaissance magical tracts, and so on – were written as fact.

For their original creators and consumers, they weren’t fantasies at all; they were factual components of a coherent and internally consistent worldview. We use them as source material for fictions that know they’re fiction, but that’s absolutely not what they originally were.

The modern Western European worldview is a profoundly scientific one. So, it favours narratives that engage with reality in a way that’s based on quasi-scientific observation. Seen in this light, fantastic narratives can be seen as a hangover from an earlier, discredited way of understanding the world.

From this point of view, Fantasy writing becomes Norma Desmond; a glamorous, pointless relic. In ‘Sunset Boulevard’, she’s a leftover from the great days of silent movies, eking out a ghostly living in the LA of the 50s.

And if we look at Fantasy like this, then Norma Desmond becomes a very relevant figure. She’s a useful index of how less conscientious critics can perceive the genre; and her personal trajectory is an incredibly potent warning against both bombast in general (‘I AM big. It’s the movies that got small’) and the specific genre sin of letting fantasising become an end in itself, rather than a mirror with which to confront the world.

And so, to conclude, here’s Norma herself in the final moments of the film, in all her deluded, tragic magnificence. Broken, maddened and desperately alone, a murderess about to be arrested, a haunted and futile relic of a forgotten world, she steps in front of the cameras and stops the show, one last, unforgettable time.

(Un)Real city

Just been reading over yesterday’s post about Zola, and I realised that there’s an unstated assumption about the actual process of writing underlying it.

I don’t think that any writer pulls something from nothing. Rather, I think that the act of writing is an act of interpretation. Details of the world are pulled into fiction and made artificial. One component of that artificiality is the context that they’re given, a context that makes them part of a broader, truth-reflecting argument. Fiction makes truthful interpretation happen by stealing from and falsifying the world.

That process of re-contextualisation starts with observation, both direct and indirect. Direct observation means watching the world, listening to people talk, taking in the look and sound and touch of things. Indirect observation means reading and research; finding out about style, gathering content, understanding the possibilities of fiction, learning from those who’ve gone before you.

I can’t imagine writing happening without such a process. Zola, for example, combined direct observation of the people and places of Paris with in-depth reading and research about the modern times he lived in. He’s a Realist in part because he worked very hard to understand how his 19th century reality worked.

The thing is, seen this way, every good writer’s a realist. The most colourful fantasist; the most operatic science fiction writer; all build their fictions through the same careful process of engagement with the world and its products. Direct and indirect observation combined underpin all effective fiction, because fiction, being a mirror, needs this world to look at in order to create its reflection.

So yesterday I argued that Zola was really a fantasist; today, I’m arguing that fantasists are really realists. Both statements are equally true, and both point to the tension between the real and the unreal that lies at the heart of any decent piece of writing, regardless of genre or aesthetic intent.

Reality’s a fantasy

Just finished Zola’s ‘L’Assomoir’ (‘The Drinking Den’), and once again been pondering the fantasy / reality gap. Zola saw himself as a Realist; closely allied with the Impressionists, he sought to create a prose equivalent to their vivid, journalistic depictions of everyday Parisian life.

Zola and the Impressionists broke cultural and aesthetic taboos, and both – in their day – were seen as exciting, dangerous artistic revolutionaries. But nowadays, both fit very easily into a very conservative view of how the arts work, and what they’re for. They’ve achieved a respectability that’s denied to genre fiction, of any kind.

That’s because of a very interesting shift. The argument for Realism has triumphed. To be perceived as having a serious moral purpose, art – and in particular writing – has to be seen to directly reflect reality. Zola’s work is now praised for the qualities that originally drove its condemnation.

And that creates problems for fantasists. Writing that makes no claim to direct realism immediately steps away from a key plank supporting critical approval. It doesn’t teach; it can’t improve; and so it’s not worthy of serious consideration. Ironically, the more fiction that a work is perceived to contain, the less it’s respected as fiction.

But such a view misses something very important. Zola writes fiction, and that makes him a fantasist too; and in that act of writing he shares very important motivations and goals with the best modern genre writers, the Moorcocks and the Mievilles, the Harrisons and the Peakes, and their peers.

First of all, there’s the fact of the fiction itself. ‘L’Assomoir’, for example, is a very built book, divided into thirteen chapters with a central turn in chapter seven, six chapters on either side mirroring each other in close and complex ways as its heroine Gervaise rises and then falls again. Throughout, imagery and action support this central, entirely artificial structure.

For all its claims to realism, ‘L’Assomoir’ is – like every other novel – an aestheticised, constructed fantasy of the world, not the thing itself. It’s built according to the writer’s need, to make a particular, more or less conscious argument. Zola summed up that argument very pithily: ‘Shut the drinking houses, open schools’.

If this were a conversation, it’s entirely possible that at this point someone would say – ‘But Al! Surely that disproves everything you’ve just said – because Zola is trying to create real change in the real world, whereas fantasists do their best to escape from it.’ And in response, I’d look at this person over my pint of Porter (because such conversations very often take place in pubs), and say:

Not at all. Any kind of writer – fantasist, realist, whatever else – is trying to create real change in the real world, using the inherently unreal tools of fiction. To read is to be changed. The word tells us that; its root comes from an old German verb, whose ‘original senses… are those of taking or giving counsel, taking charge, controlling.’

To read is to be counselled, to control information and at the same time to allow yourself to be controlled by it. Just like any other good writer, the best fantasists use that control to try and accomplish positive change in the reader and, by extension, in the world.

Michael Moorcock defined this kind of writing very precisely in a recent barnstorming Interzone editorial; the goal of such a writer is to ‘confront the present, rather than exemplify it’. He’s talking about writers like those above, like Ballard, Burroughs, Dick and others, but it’s a literary goal that I suspect Zola too would have heartily endorsed.

Dreaming nations

Well, a fascinating couple of days at the conference, not least for some very interesting insights into the sometimes wildly fantasised views that the American and British political classes have about their respective countries, and their place in the world.

First of all, the US. Advertising maven Keith Reinhardt works in various ways with the US business community to improve America’s standing in the world. He’s very aware of the issues that American foreign policy has created for people’s perception of the US; but his response to those issues was oddly schizophrenic.

His awareness that the US could only regain its popularity by finding a more humble, co-operative and role to play in world politics was laudable. But the genuine constructiveness of this approach was undermined by a very strong sense that America is the natural world leading culture.

Reinhardt seemed to be incapable of seeing the US as just another country, neither morally inferior, nor morally superior, to anywhere else. Rather, the issue as he implicitly framed it was how America could use its undoubted and impregnable superiority to keep on leading the world, but in a humbler way – something of an oxymoron, but there you go.

The muted (but very real) triumphalism of his presentation was clearly tailored for an American audience; the mostly European gathering he spoke to was, as far as I could make out, more than a little underwhelmed. I found his fantasies of moral leadership disturbing. Living at one remove from reality can only be destructive, as several hundred thousand dead and several million displaced Iraqis would seem to demonstrate.

And then, there was British fantasising. Various backbench MPs pontificated about the UK, describing a country I’ve never visited. In their homeland, cycling old maids would represent the cutting edge of radical activity; its single finest cultural achievement would no doubt be Prince Charles’ Duchy Originals brand.

America’s cultural fantasising at least has the virtue of great expansiveness. Our ruling class, by contrast, would seem to harbour an entirely inwards looking, retrospective world view – one that makes an existential threat of any sort of contact with modernity.

Thinking about it, I suppose these two attitudes represent two opposing ways by which excessive fantasising can trap you. One externalises an unreal world that exists only to be changed by the heroic, imagined self; the other dreams up an embodiment of stasis, and then heroically battles change to protect it. In both cases, there’s a retreat from reality, and thus from the possibility of real achievement, real learning and real, constructive evolution.

Tiger city

Well, a short one today as I was dining at the conference last night (in the Stationer’s Hall, with some Ethiopian diplomats and the bloke who’s job it is to make sure that Parma Ham is really Parma Ham - fascinating evening after a fascinating day!) and now have an early start to get to it.

So, here’s a very groovy animation to be going on with: